The statements in this section constitute background to understanding the invention, and may not constitute prior art.
The historical progression of Internet technology has shown an upward trend in the personalization of web content. The first generation of mainstream Internet, commonly referred to in the industry as “Web 1.0,” was a static Internet mainly dominated with static web documents that presented static content, linked together via hyperlinks and indexed into simple web directories (such as Yahoo!) that also offered web search as a by-product feature. Web 1.0 essentially was an electronically and remotely accessible library that mirrored a traditional library such as the Boston Public Library or the Library of Congress, except that it did not close at night or on weekends. Content on the Internet was created by webmasters; the same webmasters that created the group of hyperlinked static web pages that constituted their domain on the Internet. At this point, any visitors to a web document could reasonably expect that document to carry the same content within hours, days, or even months of first consuming it, with the same content served to all visiting parties. Since only one party traditionally had the privilege to publish content within a given domain, the Web 1.0 could be described as an index of centrally-generated content. Additionally, there was very little interaction, if any, between a webmaster and a visitor to his site. What little interaction there was consisted mainly of signing “guestbooks” and if the webmaster posted his e-mail address, perhaps a few e-mails from interested visitors. There was also very little interaction between visitors. Visitors seldom knew who else was visiting the same website; they knew little of others who were likely to share similar interests by virtue of having stumbled on the same site. The best a visitor could do to interact with other visitors was perhaps to cross-reference the site's “guestbook” and start an e-mail conversation with another self-identified visitor. Some early Web 1.0 sites may also have managed “forums” for visitor-to-visitor interaction, or perhaps even webmaster-to-visitor interaction, with the goal of curating a community around common interests. For the most part though, the Web 1.0 Internet was largely composed of these limited forms of interparty communication and at the same time was growing in such a way as to a mass a great corpus of static web documents serving static centrally-generated content. Compared with the modern day Internet, this early Internet was static and impersonal to a user, where information flowed in mainly one direction.
As the Internet rapidly grew, the task of managing large bodies of static web pages quickly became an intractable problem for many webmasters. Content demand outgrew content supply through Web 1.0 methods of static publication that the industry largely shifted to what would become known as Web 2.0. The evolution came about as it became standard practice for websites to serve dynamic web pages powered by a web application and in many cases with its content data organized and indexed by a database engine. This dynamic web page generation paradigm made the problem of managing large bodies of web pages a tractable problem, since the management of a single script could account for what used to be hundreds, thousands or even millions of individual web pages. The technology for serving dynamic web pages already existed at this point—it was merely the widespread adoption and standardization of such practice that made this a significant evolution of the Internet. The dynamic generation of web content was the first step toward web personalization whereby different content could be served to different people based on preferences they indicated. To preserve these user preferences over multiple web page requests within a domain, practices emerged and standards were adopted once again—practices such as the usage of browser cookies, usage of web sessions and ultimately, user registration for login credentials for the privilege of personalized interaction with a web site. Not much new technology was utilized in this shift, but as explained before, it was the widespread adoption and standardization of these practices that distinguished this new era of web usage.
All these changes just described brought about the most important paradigm shift that is attributed to Web 2.0: decentralization of website content. This can also be described as an era of user-generated content (UGC) whereby content is openly sourced from the users of a website rather than exclusively published by the owner of the website. Since a user could now personalize his interaction with a website through a web login, he could in effect control his own small corpus of content within that website, in accordance with that website's terms. The ability to control the privacy of his information, access to his content and presentation of his content empowered the user and gave him more avenues for self-expression, as he came to entrust the maintenance of his content to websites which in return delivered on the promise of ease of content publication and distribution. At the same time, the websites themselves benefited from the increased traffic from an explosion in the supply of content, most of which was generated by its users.
The next paradigm shift as a result of the wide adoption of UGC practice in Web 2.0 was social networking. As UGC websites became an avenue for self-expression and content distribution, communities formed around this user-generated content to consume it. Whether it was a community of friends, followers, business associates, lovers, etc., websites emerged to help users build their own little communities around the content they created. For example, Facebook helps users build a community of their own friends around their content (profile, photos, life timeline, status updates), Twitter builds a community of followers around a user's brief in-the-moment thoughts, and foursquare builds a community of follows around broadcasts of a user's current locale. Other social networking websites build communities around other types of content.
At the time of this writing, the Internet is believed to be in the final stages and maturation of Web 2.0 paradigms, and it is widely debated what major shift will be attributed the identification of Web 3.0. Throughout this brief discussion of the evolution of the Internet, one might wonder how and why this pattern of events came to be. The explanation is perhaps just as elusive as the explanation for analogue patterns of events such as the history of the world, the movement of stock prices, or the events of someone's life. As such, there often emerge multiple and sometimes conflicting theories that retrofit past events in an attempt to explain the past and predict the future. Some are derived from the viewpoint of economics (incentives, supply/demand), others from psychology, yet others from physics, yet others from religion, and the list goes on. For this reason, we do not attempt to form a theory of explanation, but instead look at the whole picture to identify a sustainable trending theme that reveals the underlying problem being solved via the evolution of the Internet.
Based on the evolution of the Internet, one candidate for a sustainable trending theme of the Internet is the ease of information access. If analyzed from this angle, one could easily explain the advent of Web 1.0 static web pages as a mere reflection of the information made accessible to the public through traditional libraries, bookstores and newspaper stands. Instead of doing research quietly at the university library during library hours, a student could do research at home with an Internet connection, with loud music playing in the background, at any time of day or night. Ease of information access is a plausible theme, however, it ceases to become a trending theme at the outset of Web 2.0 shifts. While information was made more accessible and readily available by advances in Web 1.0 adoption, it was not made even more accessible and available with the advances of Web 2.0. In fact, one could even argue that information was effectively made less available especially in conjunction with the Web 2.0 paradigm of requiring user registration and login credentials before accessing content.
Taking another angle on information access, another candidate for a sustainable trending theme of the Internet would be an increase in the supply of information. Unlike the ease of information access, this theme appears to trend across the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 shifts. In fact, with the advent of the user-generated content paradigm of Web 2.0, there has even been an exponential explosion in the supply of information on the Internet as all Internet users were invited to contribute content on a wide scale. However, this trending theme of increase in the supply of information on the Internet is not a practically sustainable theme by itself. Even though the technical challenges of scaling web storage and concurrent access to this ever-growing corpus of information are being solved adequately, the fact still remains that the growth in supply of Internet content has far outpaced the combined Internet users' ability to consume it, let alone make sense of it. This is even true within internal data stores at major corporations and especially true among consumers of various services on the Internet. Therefore, the massive growth of content supply on the Internet is not an especially insightful theme to isolate because it does not exhibit qualities of a solution to an underlying problem that is constantly being evolved by Internet pioneers. It is essentially creating its own problem.
If neither easing access to information or supplying more information are sustainable trending themes that reveal a series of solutions to a problem that Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 were successively trying to solve for mankind, then what if we modified the general assumption that Internet users seek information into making a more specific assumption that Internet users seek information that is relevant to them? In this case, we find that all evolutions in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 fit into the sustainable trending theme of web personalization. In fact, many argue that the incoming Web 3.0 shift will be a widespread adoption of web personalization and consequently personalization technologies. Web personalization is the general solution to the problem of increasing the relevance of content consumed by Internet users. Taken from the beginning, the emergence of Web 1.0 static web pages by itself was a step toward personalizing how people interact with information. Before Web 1.0 Internet, one had to make a trip to the local library to seek and consume information, which meant following the library's rules on being quiet and not chewing gum, going to the library during regular library hours only, registering for library membership in order to lease information (i.e. library card to borrow books), and being subjected to the library's politically-driven limits on content type and supply (purchase decisions for books and other media are often subject to approval by town or university boards and conform to policies such as no-pornography). The static web pages of Web 1.0 liberated people from the library's institutional limitations to getting a personalized experience in interacting with information. Through the Internet of Web 1.0, Internet users could now consume information at three in the morning or on Sundays, could blast loud music while consuming information, and could even access pornography whenever and however that user wanted. In effect, Web 1.0 static web pages represented the first successful step toward personalization of the way people seek and consume information.
Next was the shift from a large corpus of static web documents to dynamically-generated web documents. This was an important next step in personalization because the widespread ability to program a single server-side script to produce different web documents based on user actions or other conditions (such as time or location) was necessary to personalize a website to a user's preferences. These server-side scripts were utilized in the static corpus of Web 1.0 documents to enable very basic interactions, such as filling out simple forms. Over time, however, these scripts became much more sophisticated and web applications began to emerge, which enriched the selection of possible user actions to more than just filling out forms. The major shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 can be identified in this gradual change. On a wide scale, users could and were encouraged to interact with websites in ways that were more personalized than ever before. The relationship between user and website achieved a level of personalization where information was exchanged in both directions, rather than just one, which made web interaction more meaningful and personal. Users created content and stored it on the website, while the website served the user other content that was relevant based on information gathered about the user. To enhance the personalization of the user's experience, websites gathered personal information such as e-mail address, phone number, name, gender, location and domain-specific preferences. This personal data was protected and made accessible, editable, updatable and controllable to the user through the institution of user login authentication, which required registration with the website.
The next wave of advancement in web personalization was in the emergence of social networks. Social networks created different ways in which a user could maintain a community of other users to consume the content he creates or join other communities that consume content others create. The community would itself be a group that was relevant to the user in some way—they could be friends, fans, business associates, lovers, or perhaps others who simply shared similar interests. In other words, social networks increased the personalization of a user's experience of consuming content on the web. In a social network, one's consumption of web content achieved a degree of relevance never before achieved.
Web personalization can be identified as the sustainable trending theme driving the evolution of the Internet from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 paradigms because it represents a general solution to the problem of relevance in the process of interacting with information. It is the only theme whose agenda has been significantly advanced by each successive paradigm shift in the history of the Internet.
In view of the above, and in response to the shift associated with the transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, the inventors have developed the systems and methods described in this patent application. It is against this background that the various embodiments of the present invention were developed.